Alissa Totman ’13 was a sophomore when she joined MIT BrainTrust, a student-run organization that connects Institute undergraduates and people with brain injuries for support and socializing. “That group was a great way to learn about the human experience of what people go through when they experience a brain injury,” she says. And it laid…
Growing up on a small farm in Nebraska, Megan Donahue ’85 discovered the wider world by reading her way through her local library. Today, she is learning how the wider universe works by studying galaxy clusters. Donahue discovered her passion for physics in that library at age 12 and started her path into astronomy thanks…
These are images of quizzes I took in 3.091, Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry, in the fall of 1980. One is my very first exam at MIT, and getting 49 out of 100 was a soul-crushing experience. I can still picture the TA, Leszek Pawlowicz, PhD ’87, returning my paper. He had a big smile on…
In corporate America, Stanley Anderson ’79 says, executives often assume that their peers grew up in privileged circumstances. He did not. “I spent my early years trying not to get recruited into gangs, getting shot at, watching my friends get murdered, and thinking that if I don’t leave, I will die,” says Anderson, who was…
Strokes leave 5 million people with long-term impairments each year, and a growing shortage of physical therapists makes it hard for them to get the care they need. A new approach tries to solve that problem by combining artificial intelligence and human therapy. Johannes Lachner, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor…
A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can help some people lose weight, and some research has shown that it may protect against colon cancer. But a new study suggests that such a ketogenic diet may also increase the risk of cancer in the small intestine. This type of diet forces the body to burn fatty acids instead…
The average American throws out around 81 pounds of clothing each year, and there are few options for recycling it. MIT engineers hope to cut down on that textile waste with a new type of yarn. The thermoplastic yarn mimics the properties of conventional elastic yarns, which typically combine spandex with polyester or nylon. Those…
When Tristan Brown, an associate professor of history at MIT, first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed at Old South Meeting House, he had no reason to doubt its story. Descendants of the Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label in 1987, saying it had been recovered after colonial protesters threw tea into…
Given that water is 1,000 times denser than air, moving through those two mediums requires very different mechanics—or so one might assume. Yet birds like gulls and puffins can plunge into the sea, swim underwater, and leap back into the air to fly away. And now engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have…
Netflix is making monetization a top priority amid reports of falling viewing time. As part of its third-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, Netflix lists improvements to monetization as one of its main focuses going forward, alongside efforts to boost entertainment value and leverage new technology. The streaming giant doesn't say exactly how it plans to improve its monetization, but the company notes that these goals will help Netflix "create member value that lets us occasionally raise prices
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SpaceX hit profitably in the third-quarter, with net income of $4.4 billion. AI was the engine.
OpenAI says it's adding Orchestra's team and technology to work on Rosalind, its AI model for life sciences research, and to its related Rosalind Workbench tool, a harness that aims to help researchers plan experiments and analyze results.
Snap has a new brand ambassador for its Specs AR glasses: Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr. The company has brought on Downey as Specs' "Chief Customer Experience Officer" and has published several videos featuring Downey showcasing the capabilities of the new glasses, including as a tool to get help with a putt, practice art, and watch a private video of an MMA match in bed. In one video, he also dumps the contents of a box labeled "AI glasses" into a trash bin - a shot at Meta's popular smart g
SpaceX announced revenues of $14.6 billion in its Q3 earnings on Tuesday, which it says was a growth of 161 percent year-over-year "fueled by our Super Intelligence (SI) segment and accelerated growth in Connectivity." While its Space division posted a $7 million loss in income from operations, its Connectivity group posted income from operations $2.4 billion and its SI group posted $431 million. The company's so-called "SI" business saw revenues of $7.6 billion, which were up 830 percent year-o
Oura is introducing two new cardiovascular-focused health tracking features to its smart rings designed to help users better understand the effect regular workouts and exercise are having on their long-term health, and whether they need to ramp it up or dial things down. Cardio Effort and automatic VO2 Max (previously known as Cardio Capacity) are available for the Oura Ring Gen 3 and later models, but only to users with an active Oura membership. Instead of measuring how fast or far a user went
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Trying to pull up information for certain peptides on TikTok is now returning a "no results found" page when searching for terms like semaglutide, BPC-157, retratutide, and others. That hasn't entirely erased visibility on TikTok for peptides, which are combinations of amino acids that include substances like insulin and GLP-1. The problem is peptides also include unregulated, unapproved substances that proponents like RFK Jr. say can assist with everything from weight loss to wound healing, des
Meta changes AI scraping policy but won’t add language respecting robots.txt.
Large language models are set to go lunar. A computer capable of running AI software is one of the payloads aboard Astrolab’s FLIP lunar rover, which is slated to head to Earth’s celestial companion as early as November 2026. The 480-kilogram FLIP rover, short for “FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform,” is the first in a series…